


Blake's Study Group: Thus Spake the Prophet

by Kiiratam



Series: Blake's Study Group [4]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Fluff, Light Angst, Philosophy, Studying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:48:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28626771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiiratam/pseuds/Kiiratam
Summary: Given premises A and B, derive all possible conclusions.A) That which does not kill you makes you stronger.B) Blake's study group for Aura Studies does not have a combat segment, so it cannot kill you.Takes place between Volumes 1 and 2 (My BMBLB fic index).
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long
Series: Blake's Study Group [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2097744
Comments: 20
Kudos: 49





	Blake's Study Group: Thus Spake the Prophet

Blake resisted the urge to bury her head in her book and groan, but it was a very near thing.

  
_Why did Weiss have to take **this** week off?_

  
Stifling her sigh too, she said, "Pyrrha, I think that's a very uncharitable reading of the text."

  
Jaune jumped in. "Is it? Stern seems pretty direct. I mean," he read from his book, "'The Gods are dead.' There's not exactly a lot of ambiguity there."

  
Pyrrha nodded, still looking grim, her lips pressed tightly together.

  
"Not ambiguity, but there is a lot to unpack." Blake paused, trying to figure out how to say what she meant without sounding like she was attacking Pyrrha.

  
"Great, _more_ context. " Nora had abandoned her chair entirely, and was just sitting on the windowsill. Blake was half expecting her to jump out into the falling rain. "So what is it?"

  
At least Nora was being less disruptive than normal.

  
"Well, first, Stern was writing before the Great War, in Mantle. And he made a living off of his writing."

  
"Talk about your tough crowds! So philosophy was the only thing that paid?"

  
"More or less. He wanted to be a poet-"

  
Flipping pages, Jaune said, "Oh, that explains the poetry sections." He scanned a few lines. "Pretty gloomy stuff."

  
"-And he also had to support his sick mother." Blake double checked her notes. "His writings were also pushing against the government line in Mantle, and he came close to being proscribed several times."

  
Nora nodded. "No publishing, no lien, no medicine, no food. I get it."

  
"Ohhh, and that's why he had that whole 'ancient prophet' framing going on." Jaune scribbled a note down. "It gave him plausible deniability. 'I didn't say that, it was just a character in my book.'"

  
Blake hadn't considered that particular angle, but she wasn't going to reject out of hand either. She added it to her notes, and looked up at Pyrrha, whose mood hadn't improved.

  
"And he's blaming the Gods for everything bad that's happening?" But at least Pyrrha was asking questions, instead of just stompng around on the edge of anger.

  
"Not directly, no. Stern isn't a religious thinker. He's not concerned with the affairs of the gods, but morality. And, well, he's also being deliberately provocative."

  
Nora started tapping her fingernails against the windowpane. "He also has some really good lines."

  
"I mean, he's a poet." Jaune furrowed his brow. "And I know I've seen other quotes show up in games, and comics, and stuff. The whole line about staring into the abyss and it looks back at you? Great stuff."

  
Blake had always heard it as 'gazing', but that wasn't an important distinction. She kept trying to explain to Pyrrha. "He's counting on people just hearing that line, and trying to use it to sell books. Whether it's to find out the context, or to buy up copies to destroy them."

  
_No prize for guessing which one Pyrrha was feeling._

  
But there was a lot of material to cover, and they didn't have much time to review, so Blake asked, "Did you manage to finish the reading, Pyrrha?"

  
"I got to the point where he started talking about master and slave morality, and I had to stop."

  
Rubbing her shoulder with exaggerated care, Nora said, "And then she cleaned my clock for an hour."

  
Apparently, Pyrrha had plenty of aggression left. But Blake still had walk everyone _else_ through the material, so she turned to Jaune. "What did you think about that? The master and slave morality, not the training."

  
"Um, well-" He glanced at Pyrrha and the words rushed out. "It-kinda-made-sense?"

  
"Jaune! " Blake wasn't sure if that was disbelief in Pyrrha's voice, or anger.

  
"Sorry! I mean, not as a statement on religion, but on Aura-users. Like history-wise or mythically, or whatever."

  
"Wait, I thought everyone had forgotten about Aura use before the Great War." Nora screwed up her face. "Didn't we have a whole fight about that?"

  
"Discussion, but yes. But that's why we're studying Stern. Because he was ahead of his time-"

  
Pyrrha interrupted, "And he thought Aura-users should be in charge of everything."

  
"Not... exactly." Blake pressed ahead, before Pyrrha's face could sour on her. "He's not being literal, he just wants to draw a distinction between the common mass of humanity and his idea of the next stage of evolution."

  
"Oh yeah!" Nora bounced up, and started stretching out her leg. "That reminds me. Wasn't Stern, like, _incredibly_ racist against Faunus?"

  
Jaune chimed in, "Right, I remember hearing that."

  
And Pyrrha just nodded, looking at Blake expectantly.

  
Blake couldn't hold back a sigh this time. "It's... complicated. And not really on topic-"

  
"Weren't you ranting to Weiss last week about how she couldn't just ignore the Faunus context?" Blake really hated it when Jaune had a good point.

  
It was just that it was complicated for multiple reasons, some of which had _nothing_ to do with pre-Great War philosophers.

  
_Breathe in, hold it, breathe out._

  
"Okay. So, in brief -" Blake tried to focus on the facts as she had learned them, and not who she had learned them from. "-Stern's philosophy was co-opted by the new government of Atlas. He, personally, didn't write anything against Faunus, and we have correspondence of him writing glowingly about his contemporaries in the budding Faunus Rights movement. When Atlas republished his works, they edited in anti-Faunus sentiments. So there _is_ a history of Stern being used to argue against Faunus rights, but it's not authentic to the text. At least, the actual text. And some Faunus-" Blake kept herself deliberately vague, "-respond strongly to Stern's idea of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.'"

  
Nora chimed in. "Just like Yang's Semblance."

  
"Yes, exactly." _Breathe in, hold it, breathe out._

  
Jaune leaned back in his chair. "Huh. I can see why Atlas would want to encourage that. I mean, they'd just lost the war. I mean, not really _lost_ lost, with the final battle, but-"

  
"But it helped them cope with their loss." Pyrrha was looking a little less grim.

  
"Socially, yes. Stern doesn't make value judgments, like the old state religion of Mantle, where defeat was a sin. There wasn't a period of atonement, or anything like that. New name, new kingdom, wipe the past away, pick up the pieces, and move into the future."

  
Nora sighed. "Yup. Why settle for old mistakes when you can make exciting _new_ mistakes?"

  
"But we're straying pretty far from the actual text." Blake really wanted to get everyone back to that, and **just** that. "Pyrrha, can you explain how you felt about master and slave moralities?"

  
"It's just - ugh! Helping others isn't a - a symptom of some kind of weak moral framework, a coping mechanism for personal weakness! It's the right thing to do!"

  
Jaune shuffled his notes, looking down at them and not at Pyrrha. "But, I mean... it kind of is? Like, on a society level?" He sped up at Pyrrha's frown. "A way to cope, I mean. The strong help the weak, the weak survive. And whatever it was didn't kill them, so..."

  
Pyrrha wasn't letting go of the heat in her voice. "Then why call it 'slave morality'? That's just how civilization _works_! Why not call it something reasonable, like-"

  
While Pyrrha groped for an appropriate phrase, Nora cut in, "Because reasonable-sounding philosophy didn't sell."

  
"And even apart from the economic reasons, Stern is making bold claims to try to make his readers think." Blake tried to think of a metaphor that would resonate with Pyrrha. "He's sort of running a grand melee of ideas. It's not like a lot of our earlier philosophers, where they have a single coherent philosophy."

  
Leaning back in his chair, Jaune made a thoughtful noise. "I wondered about that. I thought I was just missing something obvious."

  
"There are commonalities that keep coming up - the idea that strife creates strength, the importance of the will of the individual. But apart from rejecting him entirely on rhetorical grounds-" Blake tried to smile at Pyrrha, to soften the blow," You have to take Stern one idea at a time, because there isn't a whole _to_ reject."

  
Nora snorted. "Can I start by rejecting his whole pro-war stance? Like, not just Grimm, but pro-war between Kingdoms?"

  
"His pro- he actually-" Pyrrha was on the verge of actually becoming incandescent.

  
Blake prompted her, "Section seven, if you'd like to do a quick read." She turned to Nora. "Go ahead."

  
"First of all, if there's anyone who would be shoved into the army and told to fight for his kingdom, it _definitely_ wouldn't be Stern. So he's not advocating that he go struggle and die, but that _other_ people do it, while he, I dunno, writes poetry back home." She paused, looking at Blake. "Normally, this is where you interrupt and tell me that I'm getting into post-Great War revolutionary thought."

  
"It is, and you are. But we're starting that next week, so go ahead." 

  
It took Nora a second, but she started ploughing forward again. "I think that counts as elites with master morality telling the grunts with slave morality to go die for the greater good of the elites and the grunts doing it because it's a good thing to protect your kingdom under slave morality. Even if it isn't really _their_ kingdom, it's the elites'. Even though the people are the ones sweating and dying, the elites claim all the good stuff."

  
Before Nora could stray too far afield, Blake said, "And why do you think that's wrong, Nora?"

  
"Uh, because they didn't earn it? And they definitely don't need all of it."

  
"Stern would argue that the people forfeited their rights by subscribing to a slave morality."

  
Nora scoffed. "Yeah, yeah, self-justifying system of oppression. He can bite me."

  
Blake turned her attention to the others, since Nora was clearly understanding. Disagreeing, but understanding. Pyrrha was furiously skimming, and... "Jaune, you look like you have something to say?"

  
"Yeah. What about all of this Overman stuff? I mean, a lot of this stuff is just Stern and his mouthpieces explaining the society around him. It's all descriptive - but the Overman isn't. It's the one part of Stern that's, I dunno, looking at the future."

  
Pyrrha looked up. "He had to have _something_ to hope for. He'd already thrown aside anything else uplifting."

  
"That makes sense." Jaune started to say more, then paused. Blake wasn't exactly sure which way his mind was going to jump, and she didn't want to try prompt him and snarl him up, so she waited. "But... I mean, wasn't the end of the Great War, the king of Vale - was **that** Stern's coming of the Overman?"

  
 _Oh_. "That's... debatable." _Not that I particularly **want** to debate it, but-_ "So what is the Overman supposed to do, according to Stern? Apart from have an Aura."

  
"Umm-" Jaune started flipping through his notes.

  
Nora beat him to it. "Be really big and impressive, redefine morality, be so far beyond our tiny minds we can't even comprehend him, blah blah blah." For a Nora summary, that was actually pretty accurate.

  
"What's the alternative?" Blake figured that would also help them define the concept.

  
Jaune had finally reached the right page. "Uh, the Last Men. 'Apathetic, with a Grimmish thirst for destruction, and unwillingness to risk anything.' They just want to stay warm and fed, and not make art, or sing, or... anything."

  
" **Hmmm** , that sure sounds like something a philosopher would write about the lower classes." Nora adopted a mock-serious 'thinking' pose on the windowsill. "'I wonder why the unwashed masses outside my window want food and heat so badly? It must be because they're philosophically abhorrent, and not because they're working sixteen-hour shifts in the mines and watching their children freeze _and_ starve to death.'"

  
"And he doesn't care much for religion, and that's a very common outlet for artistic urges." Pyrrha had put her book down again. "If you don't have much time to spare, you can at least spend it making art with the rest of your religious community."

  
"Class and religion issues aside-" Blake would be so grateful when they actually _got_ to post-war revolutionary thought, and she didn't have to keep nudging Nora away from it to examine each philosopher on their own merits. "-How well does the king of Vale fit the idea of the Overman?"

  
"Um, well -" After a glance at his notes, Jaune said, "He brought Auras back into common knowledge. And created the Huntsmen Academies to encourage cooperation between the kingdoms. Ended the war, obviously. I don't really know about 'redefining morality'..."

  
Nora snorted. "Well, if he _had_ , would we have had to read all these _other_ philosophers?"

  
"He definitely represented a paradigm shift," Pyrhha started explaining, and as she talked, Blake wondered how Weiss' study groups went, with Pyrrha talking about paradigm shifts, and Ren having terse insights, and it was probably all review, and Weiss didn't have to wrangle anyone-

  
-But Blake wasn't going to rule out Weiss taking this week off on purpose, when she _knew_ Stern would fit Pyrrha with a pair of blinders -

  
There was a knock on the door, and Yang poked her slightly damp head in. "Studying hard, or hardly studying?"

  
Jaune turned to her. "Yang, do _you_ think the end of the Great War represents the emergence of the Overman?"

  
"I'm going to count that as studying hard. And uh, I'm going to go with 'yes', because nothing could be more incomprehensible to Stern than the Overman continuing to build on the foundation of everyone else." She grabbed what was technically Nora's chair and spun it around, sitting backwards on it. 

  
Pyrrha nodded. "He just... really doesn't like people. Or communities."

  
"Actually, I think he's got Mr. Kong's problem. Sort of. Kind of." Jaune took a second to collect his thoughts, and went on, "He's got, um, the desire to do the same sort of thing Mr. Kong advocated for, an ideal society, but he's got too much awareness of all of the responses and alternatives to it. So there's no grand unifying philosophy with Stern, because there's just too much stuff. So his idea of the Overman is of someone who _can_ start from scratch, and is free to take whatever they want from earlier stuff, but isn't obligated to any of it."

  
Nora laughed, "Hey, no one told me the Overman got to ignore context! Where's the sign-up sheet?"

  
"It's one of philosophy's great mysteries." Yang declaimed, in her finest stodgy lecturer voice. "But yeah, good point, Jaune. He wants simple solutions to complex problems, but he knows _he_ can't do it. So he'll theorize about someone who can. And from Stern's point of view, yeah, the king of Vale wouldn't be the Overman, ending the war or not."

  
"So who _would_ be?" Jaune didn't seem to want to give this point up.

  
And - _breathe in, hold it, breathe out_ \- Blake did have at least one more point she wanted to make before they finished. "The idea of the Overman has been co-opted by a lot of people. That's one of the big problems with Stern. He just has all of these free-floating ideas, and there's no real moral framework to them, apart from his 'will to power' idea. Which means that it's possible to construct a philosophical worldview that's based on Stern, and really just amounts to justifying whatever the person wants to do. Because they've got the 'will' to do it, and if anyone else gets hurt, 'what doesn't kill them makes them stronger'. So they can pretend that they're being altruistic, when they're just indulging their cruelty." Blake glanced at Yang, looking for... she didn't even know what. Later. "Pyrrha, be sure to finish the reading, okay? Weiss will blame me if you don't test well on the material."

  
Yang snorted. "Wow, full power to the guilt trip."

  
Coloring, Blake focused on getting her book and notes put away.

  
But Yang did seem to have caught onto Blake's goal, because she said to Pyrrha, "I'm free tonight if you want to rant." As everyone else got packed up, Yang told Blake, "We're doing 2v1s today, since Weiss is at her shindig. Starting with you and Ruby against me."

  
Blake held back a groan. There continued to be no good way to fight Yang and her Semblance. That which did not kill her...

  
Pulling out her scroll, Blake checked team-chat, more to waste time than anything. It was just Ruby telling everyone what Yang had already told her. She just needed a moment to breathe, when she didn't have to teach, or fight, or struggle-

  
The room was quiet. Rain pattered away outside.

  
"Rough session?" Yang's tone was light.

  
Blake made a fort with her arms, and buried her head in it. "I **hate** Stern."

  
"And you had to try to make three of your friends care about him."

  
"For an _hour_!" Blake lifted her head long enough to blink rapidly, trying to clear her eyes, not sure if she could trust her voice anymore-

  
_Breathe in, hold it, breathe out._

  
"Want me to tell Ruby we'll be a little late?"

  
_That which does not kill me-_

  
_-still hurts._

  
Blake mumbled into her arms. "Yes please."

  
Yang typed away for a moment, and Blake heard her scroll chime as the message went through.

  
"Hey, do you want to swing by the dining hall on the way to practice? We can grab cookies or something."

  
_Breathe in, hold it, breathe out._

  
Raising her head, Blake met her friend's eyes. "Bribery. Good idea."

  
Yang grinned. "You know it! Want me to get your bag?"

  
"Sure. Thanks. There's an umbrella in there if we want to stay dry."

  
"Hey, foresight! What a concept. ....Mine's in the room."

  
Blake reached out to ruffle Yang's damp hair. "I noticed."

  
"I just hope Ruby got one of the indoor practice rooms." Yang held the bag open, letting Blake extract her umbrella. "I'm just a delicate sugar sculpture. I'll melt in the rain."

  
"Delicate. Right."

  
"Delicate, and dainty, and prim, and proper-"


End file.
